EA_Aljo I need you to pass this on to the dev team, please. The goalies in WOC are abysmal; the 70 OVR rating they have is way too low. In my last game, there was a total of 9 goals scored on 13 shots. Every forehand backhand goes in on them regardless. I have a solution to this. Please increase the ratings of the goalies in WOC to around 80. PLEASE. It would make the game way more fun and require more skill and strategy to score, not just a simple forehand backhand.

Indeed. It's 100% goal with forehand backhand. Just takes away all fun and after 2 nights of playing I don't feel like playing anymore. What a disappoinment.

Not every team is lucky enough to have human defenders. We have 2 or 3 players and ai defenders are useless against speed machines. And when everytime forehand backhand goes it is just quite bad gaming experience. Ofc if we let 10 breakaways couple should go in but atm is 10/10 every game.

I agree a million percent. Where all tired of it. 💯 offense. D suffers agian this year. Stick em up , wheels second win. Plus pressuse ugh it's not fun...

Honest question, why are you letting players get in tight on a goalie? You gotta play defense my guy. I’m not saying goalies don’t need improvements but come on, keep shots as far away from the goalie as possible. How many times do you see breakaways in the NHL, maybe a handful in a 60 minute game. And we’re out here giving up 8 breakaways in a 12 minute game. Don’t go for hits at the blue line, that’s not real hockey. Play bend but don’t break, skate back with the offensive player, slow down the rush, stay inside the circles and cut them off when they try and jam the post, when they slow down use the poke check since at that point them slowing down will help make sure you don’t get torched, allow your teammates to get back and assist you, keep skaters to the outside (sharp angles) and if they cut into the slot that’s when you lay them out with a hit. Defense is just as important in winning games. This mentality of goalies need to save shots in tight needs to change and team defense needs to become a priority otherwise not a single team would be consistent.Now with that little rant out of the way, I whole heartedly believe that the base goalie builds can’t keep up with abilities. AI goalies are built with a standard hybrid build, no changes to the attributes and no abilities. This means that they get no boost or counter against the abilities that user skaters get. If this makes sense, then the community should realize this puts AI goalies at a severe disadvantage beyond the standard breakaway, 1on1 situation. Powerful shots are going to treat these builds as if they are peewee goalies seeing a nhl player take a shot at them. They just don’t even see the puck coming, the reactions are slow naturally and then throw on something like a screen and youre just praying it hits the goalie based on good positioning and not a goalie actually reacting well to a shot. There are a few solutions that come to mind but none that I think would make everyone happy as a community. First the base goalie build should be able to react to all shots should that are within decent positioning ESPECIALLY wrist/snap shots. The main way to score on a goalie has always been to “make the goalie move” so imo getting sniped should not happen very often and should almost never happen from a shot outside of the face off dots. Secondly, skill based one times should really be skill based. I shouldn’t be able to hold L2 and hold up and get a skill based one timer just because I’m sitting there with my RS held up waiting. I don’t even think it should be hitting up on the RS during a pass, a skill based 1T should only be hit by pressing up when and only when the puck gets to you. On top of that, in order to hit a slap shot 1T (over a snapshot 1T) you should have to hold the stick back as a wind up otherwise it should always be a snap shot 1T and not a auto slap shot 1T. Back on the goalie themselves, if youre not gonna make the base goalie build able to realistically stop the majority of ability boosted shots then goalies should be allowed 5 ability slots to cover the potentially 15 different abilities they see on the 5 different skaters they see in a 6s game. In the standard NHL main game, most teams have around 3 skaters with 1 or 2 abilities and alot of them are on different lines which means that goalies can isolate 1 specific player. However, in WOC, every single player is running a build with at least 1, sometimes 2 elite abilities, that’s a possible 10 elite abilities to try and keep track of. And as a last option and probably the least favorite of most people would be to limit skaters to a single ability, this would cause a wide variety of builds to be used on what people deem most important to them and you may or may not see as many shooting attributes on less common scoring positions such as a elite 1T on D because Stick ‘Em Up would be preferred. However, I realize that last recommendation would probably not go over well with the skating community. Regardless, those are both my thoughts on defense as a community issue as well as what I truly wholeheartedly believe is the reason goalies both AI and user have issues and some of my reasonable to more extreme suggestions of how to bring the game to a more realistic respectful aspect. I wish you all the best of luck on the ice this year and whatever happens, I’ll see you on the ice. - 406

Yeah, that long winded paragraph doesn't make the fact that if you can't find defensemen to play with or the fact that you'd rather play with AI defense than worry about possibly getting trolls on defense any better. Sometimes you can't find people to play defense and others you get defensemen who refuse to actually play defense, its bad enough we still don't have a kick feature for those people, but then watching AI defense get burned every single time is awful only to watch the AI goalie get beat on the same exact moves they got beat on last year that we begged to have fixed.

WOC Goalies are BAD! | EA Forums

20 Replies

Rainedeath
New Vanguard
2 days ago
Well it would be nice if the puck didn't literally bounce right back to people. There's no such thing as a loose puck in this game. Having skills that negate defense check or push shuvs 100% is **bleep**. And the lack of penalties that are blatant pens is garbage.
FourZeroVI
Seasoned Hotshot
2 days ago
Just some feedback, I think speeding up the manual butterfly (R2/RT) would be beneficial to quality of life with goalies as well, currently I feel as if I press it and my goalie isnt dropping fast enough to make in tight saves that are right on top of me consistently enough. Similarly to how goalies werent stopping green 1ts nearly enough.
WeTheNorthhh
Rising Rookie
2 months ago
Increase them to **bleep**ing 100. They are so bad this game is hard to play. It's not even fun to score because how absolutely horrible they are.
FourZeroVI
Seasoned Hotshot
2 months ago
I would still recommend looking into discord communities, not everyone is going to be the best defender, but a good amount will be better than AI, and there are over 3,000 people always looking to play and fill in.
EA_Aljo
Community Manager
2 months ago
Yeah. I've definitely seen the AI players get burned. I wouldn't mind seeing them get a bit of a boost.
Tylytys
New Adventurer
2 months ago
AI sure is bad at defence. They backskate doing nothing and when attacker has skated pass them they turn around and try to catch him. Ofc it's too late and backhand forehand is in.
Like said before not nearly every club has human defenders. We have 2 or 3 at best player s and it's very sad experience with useless goalies.
FourZeroVI
Seasoned Hotshot
2 months ago
I agree, however, for those using AI defenders, it does seem a little excessive for them to be able to be burned as badly as they do. I'm sure if youve ever played with AI defense youve seen them get beat on the rush multiple times for breakaways. Maybe some adjustments can be made to make them hustle more as a default, or maybe change the default strategy so they dont commit to the offensive side of the ice as much or lastly increase their speed (specifically in WOC) so that doesnt happen as often. As we know, the majority of players are utilizing 97 speed builds. Just a thought/suggestion.
EA_Aljo
Community Manager
2 months ago
Hey there. It's certainly possible there could be adjustments to goalies. We'll have to wait and see if that happens. However, if you're letting them get in close enough to do the forehand/backhand, that sounds more like bad defense.
FourZeroVI
Seasoned Hotshot
2 months ago
I can understand the game feeling that way but for a true analysis we'd have to get numbers. I do know we can look at user goalie numbers because those are tracked in game. For example, last year my breakaway and penalty shot save 's were roughly 50-60% give or take, which by your own account is lower than real life statistics by about 10%. That being said that is pretty accurate for last years overall sv%'s which typically (for good goalies) sat somewhere around 80%. With the NHL sitting around 90% that pesky 10% once again shows up. Again this is only for user goalies, unfortunately the game doesnt keep track of AI statistics. For now, its too early to tell what the end game statistics will be but if similar to the previous years then I could agree goalies need a 10% boost to their capabilities as they stand but end of day, goalies will always do better with better defenses in front of them.
PlayoffError
Hero
2 months ago
For what it's worth, the NHL does track stats for penalty shots and shootouts. Filters on the lists are somewhat arbitrary, but I think filtering out the lower sample-rate goalies is useful.
All-Time PS stats for goalies with ten or more PS against
All-Time Shootout stats for goalies with 100 or more shootout shots against
Interestingly enough the average save percentage for both is almost exactly the same. 0.681 for penalty shots and 0.682 for shootouts.
Now PS/Shootouts are not necessarily 100% analogous to a breakaway, but I think for a video game the factors that would make the real-life scenarios different ( goalie and skater time to prepare, no pressure from back-checking defenders, etc ) don't really apply, or don't apply enough to make a significant difference. Even assuming that for "video-game fun" the save percentage is going to be lower than the real-life stats, the goalies in NHL 26 don't really come close to stacking up. From what I've seen so far, if you get a clean breakaway or PS you basically have to try not to score to fail to get a goal. They're significantly worse than they were in NHL 25.